St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Kansas City, Missouri has a long history of serving the Kansas City community and being a leader within the Episcopal Diocese of West Missouri. A large collection of the Church’s operational and building records, meeting minutes, reports, correspondence, newsletters, service programs, and photographs that document this history were donated to the Missouri Valley Special Collections in 2014. We are excited to announce that this collection of St. Mary’s historical archives is now processed and available for research.

Very little is known about Dorothea Helene Eldridge. We know that she was born in Kansas City in 1922 to parents Dr. Charles J. and Dorothea Eldridge. We know that she graduated from Southwest High School in 1940. We know that she attended the University of Kansas City. We know that she was a librarian. And we know that she relocated to Denver after retiring, where she passed away in 1997.

Lawrence Marquardt was born in Nevada, Missouri, in 1930. When very young he suffered from arthritis. Treatments in Nevada did not produce any positive results, and he entered St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City in February of 1942.

In July of 1943, he had stayed at St. Luke's for nearly a year and a half, and had turned 13.

On a cloudy and cool October in 1918, a football scrimmage was played between the Northeast and Westport high school teams on the grounds of The Parade at 15th Street and The Paseo. The Westport squad won the match handedly with a score of 19 to 0.

Missouri Valley Special Collections frequently receives donations of historical photographs. Some arrive lacking any information to help precisely identify their subjects and time periods. This makes adding them to our digital image collections and making them available to the public very difficult.

The Missouri Valley Special Collections recently added a “Stockyards” digital collection to our website. This digital collection is comprised of photographs, maps, blueprints, and architectural drawings from the Kansas City Stockyards archival collection. Though there is currently only a small portion of the collection digitized, we hope to continue adding to this collection as more items are scanned.